@inproceedings{yin-etal-2026-language,
    title = "Language Reconstruction with Brain Predictive Coding from f{MRI} Data",
    author = "Yin, Congchi  and
      Ye, Ziyi  and
      Li, Piji",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.949/",
    pages = "20720--20743",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Many recent studies have shown that the perception of speech can be decoded from brain signals and subsequently reconstructed as continuous language. However, there is a lack of neurological basis for how the semantic information embedded within brain signals can be used more effectively to guide language reconstruction. Predictive coding theory suggests the human brain naturally engages in continuously predicting future words that span multiple timescales. This implies that the decoding of brain signals could potentially be associated with a predictable future. To explore the predictive coding theory within the context of language reconstruction, this paper proposes PredFT (FMRI-to-Text decoding with Predictive coding). PredFT consists of a main network and a side network. The side network obtains brain predictive representation from related regions of interest (ROIs) with a self-attention module. The representation is then fused into the main network for continuous language decoding. Experiments on two naturalistic language comprehension fMRI datasets show that PredFT outperforms current decoding models on several evaluation metrics."
}